Ye Waverly Blog: An Unexpected Note

A hand-written note unexpectedly arrived at the Waverly during daytime prep hours the other day. Its sender: an executive at a Manhattan-based independent film company, hoping, as he explained in his spidery hand, “to buy your friendship” in order to “blow the doors off of some clients I have in town.” How? By securing a dinner reservation “anytime between tonight and Friday.” Attached to the note: two wrinkled fifty-dollar bills.

Unswayed in the least was Emil Varda, the restaurant’s manager and moat-minder. As he explained in his indecipherable pan-European accent, he simply sent back the bribe with a third fifty-dollar bill and a note of his own that read, “This is to buy some class, baby.”